🔮 Tarot + Tree — The Decan Layer
36 decans (10° zodiac segments) — each carries a Minor Arcana card, a Major Arcana/zodiac trump, a planetary ruler, a sephirah, a Hebrew letter, and its two governing Shem HaMephorash angels. Click any decan to open the full correspondence.
In plain words: the zodiac is a circle of 360 degrees. Cut it into 36 slices of ten degrees and each slice is a decan. Every decan owns one numbered tarot card, sits inside one sign (so it shares that sign’s trump card and Hebrew letter), is flavoured by one planet, points to one sphere on the Tree of Life, and is watched over by two of the 72 angels. This page lays all 36 out.
New to decans? The five words you need
Decan — A ten-degree slice of the zodiac. Each of the 12 signs contains three of them, giving 36 decans in the full circle — and each decan matches one of the 36 numbered tarot cards.
Minor Arcana — The numbered tarot cards, two through ten in four suits — 36 cards in total, one for each ten-degree decan of the zodiac. Each card also has an old title (“Lord of Dominion” and so on) from the Golden Dawn tables, shown in italics on the tiles.
Major Arcana — The 22 picture cards of a tarot deck, from The Fool at 0 to The World at 21. There are 22 of them and 22 Hebrew letters, which is why the two systems are matched up throughout this corpus. A decan shares the trump of the sign it sits in, so all three decans of Aries carry The Emperor.
Sephirah — The ten stations on the Tree of Life — ten stages that creation passes through on its way from pure potential down into physical matter. One of them alone is called a sefirah. A numbered card points to the sphere of the same number: every 2 sits on sphere 2, every 10 on sphere 10.
The 72 angels — A traditional set of 72 named angels, each governing a five-degree slice of the sky. Because a circle has 360 degrees and 360 ÷ 5 = 72, they divide the year into 72 equal stretches of about five days each. Ten degrees holds two of those five-degree slices, so every decan has exactly two angels.
How a tile reads: the first numbers are the two angels (out of 72); then the sign and which third of it (I, II, III); then the card and its old title; then the sign’s trump, its Hebrew letter, and the sphere.
Does this table actually hold together? — checked, and two places it does not
Every claim the primer above makes was counted against the data on 9 September 2026, and these counts are recomputed each time the page loads rather than written down.
- 36 of 36 decans put a numbered card on the sphere of the same number — so “every 2 sits on sphere 2” holds for all 36 with no exception. Nine of the ten spheres are used, four decans each; Kether gets none, because the numbered cards start at 2.
- 72 of 72 angels agree with their decan about which card and which sign they belong to. The two tables were built from different sources and they do not contradict each other once.
- But the two tables disagree about dates on 19 days a year. The decan windows open one day before the angel windows do, every time. Six of the nineteen cross a sign boundary as well — 20 Jan, 19 Feb, 20 Apr, 22 Jul, 23 Sep and 23 Oct — so on those days the two tables put you in different signs. Open any decan below whose window is affected and the card says so on the spot.
- And 29 February belongs to no decan. The 36 windows cover 365 days; in a leap year the extra day falls through. (The angel table covers all 366 with no gap and no overlap, so an angel is always available even when a decan is not.)
Neither disagreement is patched here. Which date table governs is a ruling — see the Canon, where the author settles this kind of thing in the open rather than by deleting the loser.
The 36 decans
In zodiac order, starting at Aries. Colour is the element of the sign — Fire, Earth, Air, Water.
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